[rt-users] Out of office loops

[Sean Perry]

Bruce Campbell wrote:

> On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Sean Perry wrote:
> 
> 
>>>>>>>>"SP" == Sean Perry <sean.perry at intransa.com> writes:
>>>
>>>SP> what about hacking rt-mailgate to drop Out of Office messages?
>>>Care to share a fool-proof method of detecting what is an OoO message
>>>and what is not?  I'm sure you'd make a lot of friends by doing so.
>>
>>well the lame way of "does subject begin with 'Out of (the )?Office
>>((auto)?reply)'" would work unless you expect to receive tickets
>>reporting problems with the Out of Office system.  Another possibility
>>is parsing the message body for the reply template.  Most systems send
>>the same message with the dates adjusted.
> 
> 
> *snort*.
> 
> That will remove a goodly number of loops, but Murphy's Law dictates that
> you'll then have a rush on people seeking help with how to set up their
> vacation autoresponder... which you'll drop on the floor.
> 

yeah, it does depend on what tickets you deal with.  For some people 
just dropping the out of office messages will work.  For an IT 
department servicing a sales staff it will not.

> Unfortunately, I've seen too many autoresponders which didn't quote a
> decent (parseable) amount of your text, which makes detecting loops a bit
> harder.
> 
> 

Vacation messages not including any of the original text was the 
inspiration for checking the message body against known autoresponse 
templates.

I have not implemented this in RT, but I have done work in the past of 
writing software to scan mailboxes for useless messages in order to save 
disk space or help the person who went on vacation deal with their inbox 
when they return.